I find her behind one of the old desks, standing before a chest-high door that looks like a bank safe. It’s almost the exact color of the wall and nearly impossible to see unless you’re really looking.
And there, on the lower right side, is a keypad.
My adrenaline spikes, and I pull up my notes app, reading off the code she saw in her vision.
She punches in the numbers, and the indicator light turns green, the locking mechanism releasing. She pulls open the door and peers inside, a rush of cold air leaking out around her.
“Ew,” she whispers. “This place reeks. And what is that sound?”
I cock my ear, picking up the sounds of a dripping pipe and some kind of scuttling, scratching noise that could either be roaches, scorpions, snakes, giant rats, or some or all of the above.
In other words…
“Okay, well, thanks again for meeting me tonight, Carly. I should probably get back to home. Ani and I have plans, so...”
Carly glares at me. “Are you serious right now? We made it all this way, and you’re bailing in the home stretch?”
“Dark, danky-ass basement chambers are where people go to die.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Every horror movie ever?”
“Stay here if you want to, but Iknowthis is the place from my vision. I need to see what’s down there—preferably before Trello comes down.”
Goddess, I’d nearly forgotten about her—the whole point of this ridiculous spy game.
Before I can stop her, Carly’s already descending into the murder-chamber, leaving me no choice but to follow her. Because that’s the other thing every horror movie fan worth her blood-curdling scream knows: as soon as you split up, you die.
There’s another keypad on the inside, and we test it to make sure it’s the same code before closing the door behind us. We head down another staircase, this one narrow and claustrophobic, the whole chamber definitely built before fire codes were a thing.
“Holy shit,” Carly whispers. “This is it.”
Coming up behind her at the bottom of the stairs, I shine my phone light around, taking in the horror movie set we’ve just stepped into.
This room is smaller than the main storage room above, but it too is jammed with shelves, each one lined with so many jars and bottles, we could give Professor Broome’s potions classroom a run for the money. But unlike the stuff on Broome’s supply shelves, the bottles we’re looking at now aren’t just ingredients. They’re active potions, glowing and swirling, some casting a faint magickal hum.
Carly reaches for one of the glass bottles and brings it in for a closer look. It casts her skin in a pale glow. “It’s essence.”
“Holy shit,” I breathe. Essence can only come from one source.
Other mages and witches.
Past the shelves, a massive bulletin board spans the entire back wall, divided up with masking tape into tiny squares. Tacked inside each square is a tiny ziplock bag about the size of a Saltine cracker. Each holds a lock of hair.
Whenever I touch one of the baggies, one of the bottles on the shelf glows brighter.
“The hair is the connection to the source of the magick.” Carly says.
“Carly, this is… Remember the students who got attacked? Kirin’s sister told us they’d been found with chunks of hair cut off.”
“Well, now we know why they lost their magick. It’s here.”
“But who the fuck would do something like this?”
“It has to be Trello,” she says.
“But why would Trello steal power from her own students? For one thing, she has her own magick. And for another, this isn’t a very sustainable practice. When word gets out, who’s going to enroll here?”
